Gaming

I'm an obsessively habitual person.
If something isn't a habit then it never gets done. Ever.

And seeing as I've steered this thread a bit off-topic I'll try to swerve it back by saying that I dusted off an old X-Box the other day (or 'eggs-box' as Banj sometimes calls it) and I've been re-enjoying "Knights Of The Old Republic II".

Still retro but not *as* retro.

"Easy Mode" is what I now have to select from the options menu. Sad, I know, but it has to be done. My Ninja Gaiden disc remains forever in its case.

I think the hardest games though were those very old ones that weren't supposed to be hard but were just badly designed. I remember an old Amiga game (EDIT: just googled and it was actually an even older Spectrum game!) called Army Moves where the second screen was virtually impossible (you had to bounce your jeep over a collapsed bridge whilst simultaneously shooting a plane.) I got past it once by accident and the subsequent levels weren't nearly so bad.
Also the third screen of Another World was very tough as you had to avoid some equally spaced poisonous worms, but having played that again on a SNES emulator recently the difficulty was down to the Amiga's measly one button joystick.

Yep, that's right, it was the only moment in the whole game when you had to kick anything and it was a whole lot easier when you had the extra button for kicking instead of having to contrive that diagonal combo which never worked for me and seemed frustratingly cruel so early in the game.

They were both interesting games though with terrific rotoscoped animation. Flashback did seem to have a very obvious rigid format to the level design, you could clearly spot the platform "grid" whereas Another World was much more dynamic in its layout. Those 2d vector graphics looked absolutely horrible in screenshots but when it was animated it looked like nothing else I'd ever seen.

Valence wrote:

"Easy Mode" is what I now have to select from the options menu. Sad, I know, but it has to be done. My Ninja Gaiden disc remains forever in its case.

I think the hardest games though were those very old ones that weren't supposed to be hard but were just badly designed. I remember an old Amiga game (EDIT: just googled and it was actually an even older Spectrum game!) called Army Moves where the second screen was virtually impossible (you had to bounce your jeep over a collapsed bridge whilst simultaneously shooting a plane.) I got past it once by accident and the subsequent levels weren't nearly so bad.
Also the third screen of Another World was very tough as you had to avoid some equally spaced poisonous worms, but having played that again on a SNES emulator recently the difficulty was down to the Amiga's measly one button joystick.

ninja gaiden black on the original xbox was pretty hardcore for a modern game, but the ones on nes where a nightmare , and you are right, i think those games weren't meant to be like that it was just lack of testing and rudimentary game design, one good example of that is DR. jeckyl and Mr Hide; which i think is the hardest nes game

kazky wrote:

For years we said 'motzaruba' or 'mytowbar'' for pretty much everything.

we're weird like that.

The only weird thing about that is that I used to do exactly the same thing! But I always heard that second one as "Mine-Foobar."
And when I was typing that message the other day I couldn't get to the end of it without repeating, in a strange voice, "Mine-Foobar, Mine-Foobar!"
Thankfully there was no-one around to hear me or I may have been arrested and sectioned.